Throughout the early modern period, countless diplomats, traders, and couriers traveled the dangerous sea and land routes between Venice and Istanbul. These individuals connected the two empires and allowed for the regular movement of information, food supplies, and other assets vital to the prosperity of both polities. They did so under the protection of lofty diplomatic agreements, the ahdname or capitulations, which enshrined mobility practices in the Eastern Mediterranean. However, the ahdname were far from the only instruments that addressed mobility between Venice and Istanbul. For example, on June 13. 1524, the Venetian resident ambassador (bailo) in Istanbul, Piero Bragadin, received a visit from Ali Bey, a translator in Ottoman service, who accompanied a high-ranking Ottoman ship captain and four lesser naval officers. The Ottomans had come to request Venetian patent letters (lettere patente), a form of travel paper which would identify them as friends of Venice while cruising in the Mediterranean. Several weeks after the Ottoman Imperial Council returned the favor when it granted Bragadin orders so that Venetian couriers “would not be molested while coming and going” between Venice and the Sublime Porte. The Venetian made frequent use of these orders, which they referred to as “way orders” (comandamenti di strada), and almost literal translation of the Ottoman term yol hükmü. How then did the capitulations translate into the reality of everyday travel that we glimpse through the Venetian anecdote? How did the ahdname interact with secondary documents ranging from the passes described above to permits (licentiae/tezkere), and safe-conducts (salvacondotti/aman), all of which played a crucial role in regulating the daily movement of goods and people? In other words, how did the macro level of the capitulations and the micro level of individual travel documents interact? This talk explores these questions by focusing on the sixteenth century, a period in which both the capitulations and personal travel papers experienced significant formal and functional developments. By relying on both Venetian and Ottoman sources, this paper argues that the capitulations could act, at the same time, as diplomatic agreement and as travel papers and that their presence significantly defined the contours of Venetian and Ottoman everyday travel papers and practices.